


Old hands at fear (Hannibal / The Magnus Archives crossover anthology)

by WheelCoveredInEyes



Category: Hannibal (TV), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional warnings at chapter heads, Gaslighting, Gen, M/M, Manipulation, Set in the TMA-universe, Shippy content is only implied really, Supernatural Elements, Violence, abuse of cool ecology concepts for worldbuilding purposes, but does not include TMA characters, canon-typical creepy shit, canon-typical psychiatric abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:08:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26940409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WheelCoveredInEyes/pseuds/WheelCoveredInEyes
Summary: A series of vignettes of Hannibal as set in the TMA-verse, with Will and Hannibal each embodying different Magnus Archives fear entities. (No Magnus Archives characters appear.)
Relationships: (briefly) - Relationship, Hannibal Lecter/Wendigo, Will Graham & Alana Bloom & Jack Crawford, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	1. A dangerous game

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kelardry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelardry/gifts).



> This is an exchange gift for Kel. 
> 
> The vignettes are Will and Hannibal-centric. They're set at different points through the series; and take place in slightly different variations on the setting - generally, Hannibal has at least a good idea of the true supernatural nature of the world, and Will has less of one. Where necessary, Will and Jack work for a sub-unit of the FBI called the Unusual Incidents Unit, which deals with Fear-related incidents. (Consider it the US Federal version of the Sectioned cops or The Magnus Archives. It's loosely Hunt-aligned. The name is straight-up stolen from the SCP Foundation.) Look, I'm making it up as I go.
> 
> I don't think this fic has "graphic depictions of violence" but there's some violence and it's definitely aiming for unsettling, so you know, be careful.
> 
> No betas, we kayak like Tim. (Except Chapter 4! Thank you, reader friend.)
> 
> \- - -
> 
> This first vignette is more based on the show and inspired by the Web and the Hunt than set in a particularly supernatural AU.

Will tries to make himself small, unremarkable, harmless, to anyone who sees him. He stutters, and avoids eye contact, and fishes. God knows a man like him has multiple reasons to wish to give off an aura of _docility_ , of _domestication_. This is just one.

Hannibal respects the effort, but reads his affectations of civilization like a book. It’s a pity that most are so blind, that Hannibal is among a quiet few who see him plainly, his flannel and fear for what they are: camouflage.

  
“I fish,” Will corrects Abigail, “Not hunt.”

“It’s the same thing, right?” Abigail shrugs, nervously. “At least for the fish.” She’s never seen much of a difference.

“A fish is an early invention,” muses Hannibal. “They litter the base of the tree of life. In a sense, we are all fish.” But that obscures a lot.

He says to Will, “When you think about killing, what do you think of?” and he knows the answer.

He says to Alana, “Do you feel safe around Will?” and he knows the answer.

He says to Margot, “Would you feel guilty after killing your brother?” and he knows the answer.

A shiny lure, a birdcall, an invitation – they’re all the same thing. Incredibly, every one of them believes they’re having a real conversation.

This is not Will’s game – this slow, exquisite affair of minute glances and long hours, of stray words and private fears. He has entirely the wrong temperament for it, no skills whatsoever. Hannibal keeps spreadsheets and mind-palaces, Will keeps having nightmares.

But Will’s instincts are _good_. Hannibal is impressed and fearful of the prowling thing in Will, the frightened and hungry animal who’s picked up Hannibal’s scent and won’t let it go. Even in dreams, in hallucinations, Hannibal knows it’s chugging away, worrying it bare, unwilling to let it go, and insisting on leading Will down a path he’d rather not go.

A natural philosopher Hannibal had once read speculated that hunting animals must have a great deal of empathy indeed – to be able to tell where a deer would be the next day, based on its scent and tracks of the previous day, a wolf has to know a deer better than it knows itself. Indigenous master trackers were known to hallucinate silver lines showing the paths of animals they tracked, their unconsciouses knitting together chaotic environmental cues into a convenient pointer for the frontal cortex.

So Hannibal’s reluctant to label anything in Will’s roiling stock-pot mind as a problem, even if it might damn the both of them.

“You have an empathy disorder,” Hannibal lies, and he means, at least partially, _You shouldn’t be able to see me._

Still, dancing with Will is unlike dancing with Bedelia, or anyone else who came before him. Will is uncomfortable, always, all the time – ready to fly as he is to fight. A wolf should fear the tines of the stag almost as much as the stag fears the wolf. One bad blow and the wolf will never hunt again.

So Will freezes, and runs, and keeps his eyes open, and trips over his sentences. Hannibal watches, and reassures, and weaves quiet threads around the both of them, barely daring to test their weight. He is ecstatic and afraid. On that wondrous day when their paths truly meet, when Will finally gives chase, Hannibal may not know how to flee.


	2. Dinner party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Spiral (Will) (sort of) and the Flesh (Hannibal). Plus a bonus guest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Further CWs in this chapter: mentions of nausea, straight up gaslighting, a bit of implied bastardization of the Wendigo mythology for my own worldbuilding devices. Would you believe I forgot *until I was partway through writing this* that "wendigo psychosis" was a thing?
> 
> Set... somewhere in late season 1.

Meat cooking itself! The human is a marvelous animal. _Will_ is a marvelous animal. He is not the most conscientious dinner guest, not in this state, not while he's dutifully boiling his own brain, but Hannibal can excuse that. After all, he brings his own entertainment.

Right now, for instance, he is staring off to Hannibal’s left, where there is an untouched place setting. Will’s spoon dangles carelessly from his hand.  
  
“Who do you see, Will?”

“The man-stag. I wasn’t… aware… you two were acquainted.”

“Indeed?” Hannibal blots his lips in between bites. “I thought he might like some dinner.”

“He’s not eating anything. Or moving. He’s just… sitting there.” Will blinks a few times. His spoon drops and clatters on the ground, and he flinches, swaying, attention focusing to his plate. He’s forgotten the spoon. “Truth be told, my stomach has been off lately too. I’m sorry; this looks delicious.”

Hannibal retrieves a new spoon from the buffet and passes it to Will. Hannibal had suspected as much; he could have tried harder to account for Will’s constitution – soup would have been better, for instance. But he’d had the sausages and confit for cassoulet, which was still relatively easy to digest, and it was really best to cook with what was fresh and available.

“Try to eat something, Will,” Hannibal encourages. “How long have you been dealing with nausea for?”

Will grimaces, self-conscious. “It’s more like vertigo. I’m still hungry, but... I… don’t know…?”

He pokes his plate with the side of his spoon.

“No?”

“No,” says Will, swallowing. “A long time.” Delicately, tentatively, he tries a bit of the scarlet sauce of the cassoulet. He gulps it down, wincing pre-emptively, but his eyes widen and Hannibal sees his pupils blow. Will changes the grip on his spoon – intentful, now – and takes a proper, hearty bite. Hannibal imagines he hears music, Shostokovich perhaps, as Will eats like a dying man. Only scraps are left when he starts violently, dropping the spoon and staring down.

“Something wrong, Will?” asks Hannibal.

“Who’s the third place set for?”

“The third...”

“The. The table setting.” Will stares. “The third – was someone going to join us?”

“I only put out plates for the two of us, Will,” says Hannibal, sounding mildly concerned.

Will shudders, and then blinks, says “’Scuse me - ” and then he’s gone, jaw slack and eyes blank. Rude, certainly, to leave the table on such short notice, but Hannibal is content to put the two of them past etiquette, especially on a night like this. Man likes to think that it’s the only thing that separates us from the beasts, but even wolves take turns.  
  
It’s more like a foundation to fall back on in uncertainty. Even half out of your mind, you can say please and thank you and still be good company. What is it they say to those lost in the Fae? _Be polite?_

It is the neutral ground where he and his lover can dance.

In the clump of stately, manicured pines that dot the sideyard of his house, there will be a trail into woods too remote and cold to belong to Baltimore. It will be gone by morning. Hannibal doesn’t mind the intrusion – he feels deeply comfortable, sated, warmed by the fire and a half-glass of wine, engaged with his surroundings, awake to the palette of organic molecules drifting through the air and perfuming off the stew.

WE SHOULD BE GOING SOON, says Hannibal’s third guest. IT’S A LONG WALK HOME.

“Are you sure you won’t try a bite?”

The wendigo shifts over, wrapping a pins-and-needles arm playfully around Hannibal’s shoulder, and delicately steals a bit of sausage from Hannibal’s plate. It brings the fork to its mouth and swoops its dextrous ungulate tongue around the mouthful, and sighs in satisfaction at the taste.

DELICIOUS, it informs Hannibal. BUT I THINK I PREFER VENISON.

“To what?” Hannibal asks, politely blank.

They both laugh.

Will sweats in his seat. He will not remember this night.


	3. Oysters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Eye and the End, and what they may be able to offer each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Further CWs: Some intentionally-uncomfortable descriptions of food.
> 
> (For the purposes of this AU, the "Unusual Incidents Unit" where Jack and Will work is the American version of 'sectioned' cops or the Magnus Archives. I stole the name from the SCP Foundation universe.)
> 
> Set during... AU S1E1 or E2 or so.

People send him things, all sorts of things. Things they aren’t sure what to do with, or who they’ve tried everything else for. They send him people who’ve been kicked out of or passed unmoved out of copious other therapeutic programs. Often, they come into his office, and Hannibal leans in, and looks at them closely, and says things that they already know and that cut them to the core. Sometimes they leave the office afterwards, wide-eyed, blank, their panic or madness overwritten; other times, they do not. Jack sent Hannibal Miriam, once, but that was an accident.

But everyone sends their problems to Hannibal, eventually; and Jack Crawford, Director of the FBI Unusual Incidents Unit, has more problems than most. So he eventually sends Hannibal yet another gift – an overworked and anxious young investigator who knows too much. He fidgets in his chair, tucks his hands into his sleeves, hits his hands on his legs when his fantastic imagination is too grand for him.

“I see _so much_ ,” says Will. “Everything people do – I read what they’re thinking, I know why they do things, even when they don’t. I can’t stop.”

“What about me?” Hannibal leans in. Jack sent Will to Hannibal for a reason. Will’s gaze lands on Hannibal, finally, searching him over. He hasn’t seen Will make eye contact with anyone except lifeless bodies before. _Autistic_ , he had thought at first, and now he realizes – _but not just that._ Will looks like he’s braced himself, but seems not to hit the landing he’d feared.

“It doesn’t work on you,” Will admits, and politely tucks his prying eyes away. It’s an appreciated gesture, Hannibal knows now, although pointless.

“Does that frighten you?”

“It’s actually kind of nice,” says Will. A half-truth – Will is discomfited by what he sees, but can’t tell why, not yet. It must madden him.

“Tell me Will, when you look at me, what do you see?”

Will thinks. “I see something inevitable.”

“Like food,” says Hannibal. “Eating is an inevitable part of life. But we need not curse it for being such. We can choose to enjoy the inevitable, to make it good.”

“I’m not good at that,” Will admits. “I gave up meat because – I can just see them in cages, when I eat it, who and how many and what they think the world is made of. It’s not good. Even a salad, I can tell what ate holes in the lettuce and how many spiders went into the harvester. I’m sorry,” and he grimaces and hits his legs again.

“No need to apologize, I have a strong stomach,” says Hannibal. “Is there any food you do like?”

“Fries,” says Will. “Pasta, uh, potatoes, onions. Clams? I know I just said meat, but a clam – I mean, it doesn’t have much going on. I thought I’d hate the texture, but I can eat one alive and it’s – soporific, almost.”

“There you go,” says Hannibal, although he mentally corrects, _oyster. You can eat an oyster alive._ (Hannibal’s palette is, of course, broader.) “Your options may be narrowed, or you have constraints, but even you can find delight in the inevitable. This is evidence that your problems can be helped. And it seems I may be the right person to work with you in particular. If you trust me, of course.”

“I suppose it’s worth a try,” says Will.

Hannibal is thrilled.

But he notes that he had better not serve Will any of his better cooking, not for a while yet.


	4. Disruptive ecology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Corruption and the Lonely. On symbiosis, and what the truly exceptional mind is capable of. THIS ONE GOT WEIRD, Y'ALL.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, I’m playing with some ideas from plurality, but I am hoping I’ve done so in a way that respects IRL plural people. Um, both IRL and in this AU, plural systems – even systems with many many different headmates - are not only caused by eldritch fear-monsters.
> 
> To be clear, Hannibal is not a wholly sympathetic narrator here. (This will be obvious if you’ve… seen… the show.) And as I hope I indicate here, Will is not wholly harmed by his situation.
> 
> Note that while bugs are mentioned and I use metaphors based on the corruption, the thing here is more conceptual than worms or decay. So even if you hate those, you might be able to read this – but use your own judgment, naturally.
> 
> Spans through the end of S1.

Will is riddled with consciousness. His brain is, for whatever reason, a ripe field for sentience, and he is the world’s worst farmer. It’s like watching a garden struggle to weed itself. The ivy arguing that it’s an _ornamental_ , not an _invasive;_ the dandelions just trying to get in and grow as fast as they can before someone notices; the trees that surely weren’t supposed to be planted in the first place but are now far too large to consider removing; the potato plants trying to justify their existence in the patch with little aboveground to show for it. Meanwhile, the system as a whole has no ability to wield a pair of hedge clippers or an herbicidal spray. It simply doesn’t have the leverage.

As a therapist thus far, Hannibal has avoided working with the victims of the Corruption. It’s rather antithetical to his ends, and there’s not much that can be done for them. It does depend on the infesting organism, however. He’s had an academic curiosity for some time in eusocial colonies. The most accomplished of the Hive’s Avatars tend to be eusocial, rather than any old colonial organism, or worse yet a mixed-species arrangement. A eusocial colony is practically an individual – it breeds as one unit, its members act for the good of the bloodline, not themselves. They’re everything the human species thinks it should be – noble, unified, undisturbed by or even insensate to pain incurred for the good of others. Hannibal suspects there is a profound capacity for loneliness there. The ability for many small minds to be so close with each other and yet so alienated from their motivation – an intelligent enough collective, made aware of its nature as such, and then perhaps further shown of how unique its existence is and how inscrutable its desires are; how nobody else could possibly share in its purpose – well, these are only theories, but Hannibal has a well-founded confidence in his own abilities, and would appreciate the challenge.

So when the director of the FBI’s Unusual Incidents Unit points him towards an agent pulled from the field for a little undue familiarity with some of the more unusual aspects of the work; and Hannibal sees a man reeking of Corruption yet who is nonetheless living his life and holding a job and even considered roughly capable by his peers – well, Hannibal suspects a hive, and so agrees to treat him.

Will – or the conglomeration of entities introduced to him as Will – proves beyond what Hannibal knew the Corruption to be capable of.

In anatomy, in medicine, a patient with a multi-species infection has a worse prognosis than infection with one species alone. Natural selection is too generally competitive, too red in tooth and claw, to allow competing predators to exist in the same place for long. And should the partnership of species be shown to be truly stronger than either alone, then there is generally little room for the soft substrate of the patient. Most of the Corruption’s victims fall apart, even those that are – as most infections are until the very end – only one species. Hannibal respects its methods, crude but efficient, even if he thoroughly abhors the rest of the Corruption. (That doesn’t frighten him either. The Corruption does not demand respect, it simply _is_.) Will is… not this.

Hannibal digs a little deeper. Purely psychological infections are not unheard of. The first European researcher to discover the nature of the naked mole-rat (another eusocial species, adding a point in favor of Hannibal’s theory) famously surmised of its existence before locating any actual individual. That researcher studied eusocial insects, and wondered what circumstances it would take to produce a eusocial mammal. He thought it should have to be underground, and isolated, and eat from a rather rich food source not much in competition with others, and many more things besides.

And the researcher fell deeply into his work, withdrew from his colleagues, withdrew into a basement study where he read exclusively from the rich compendium of distilled knowledge of evolutionary ethology from the zoologists of history.

By the time an expedition found the curious, runty species burrowed into grasslands in the Horn of Africa, the researcher’s own mind was so full of mole-rats that when the curious specimens found colonizing his apartment were compared to those returned from the Ethiopian expedition, the two were so similar that they could interbreed.

(The broader literature assumed that the professor had in fact known of the species well enough to maintain a smuggled colony and kept this secret to fake a discovery later. Hannibal’s more esoteric literature and journals knew otherwise, and found it a curious case for reasons more sympathetic to the scientist’s memory.)

However, Will’s case is no crawling obsession. Hannibal still suspects the Spiral’s influence, perhaps in the design, but as it is, it is thoroughly Corruption. He sees Will as Will cannot see himself, as a sort of child-god: he constructs a model of a serial killer, breathes awareness into it, sees and thinks what it thinks – and then he lets it go into the wilderness of his mind. His mind is filled with murderers.

But not only murderers.

Because it turns out Will does this _constantly_. Friends, strangers; Will anxiously imagines their interactions, consults on them, has conversations with them. He is perfectly clear that these are his own constructs and not anything more to do with the people themselves, _but_ , he says, _they feel real, and they’re pretty close_. He does it out of fear, trying to plan out his interactions in advance. Sometimes there are multiples – “like there’s, uh, a dream-Jack,” he tries to describe, embarrassed, “idealized, or something, and then there’s what Jack would really say. I can imagine both.”

His inarticulation and wavering moods and mindsets make sense, Hannibal realizes – Will is shuffling between many selves like a deck of cards, each one with their own goals and ideas and sensibilities. Some come out more than others, some have clearer images of the world than others, but none of them sees the whole of it. If Hannibal asks, Will voluntarily can summon a number of these to the surface to converse or twitch or pace around the office. If Hannibal pushes just right, he finds he can draw out even more. Without being aware of it, Will has built a fantastic system of self-controls, monitoring loops, treaties and agreements and reminders; like a blind man building an elephant from scratch.

Will thinks he has to work so hard because he is crazy: he doesn’t know the half of it.

Will loves animals, always has. Hannibal wonders if he surrounds himself with dogs because their behavior is easier to guess. His brain contains simulacra of each dog, and every pet he’s ever owned, and a great number of the fish he’s caught. The hall of his mind has a shadow-cast of everyone he’s ever met – no wonder he’s so restless, no wonder his dreams are so busy.

* * *

“What’s happening to me?” Will near-sobs, feverish. The loss of memory has frightened him, but moreso, it’s given him a look at what the inside of his head really looks like day-to-day. “I don’t know who I am.”

“Self-identity is over-appreciated in Western culture,” Hannibal says gently. “Do not force it. Just let yourself be, here. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

The voice that comes out of Will’s mouth is definitively, impossibly, not his own. As the entity in Will’s body talks, Hannibal feels the first church-bell ring of fear that he may have pushed Will too far.

* * *

“I know who I am,” Will snarls, shaking and sweating, pointing a gun at Hannibal. Hannibal has to smile at whoever is talking to him now – some entity borne too quickly of desperation, lucid but unstable. In a way, he suspects it’s the one self he’s met who’s most characteristic of the Will-collective as a whole.

But you won’t for long, Hannibal wants to say.

* * *

After Will's institutionalization, Hannibal has a troubled few days. He reaches for the quiet desolation of his god, but feels little. Instead he imagines Will, a creature so unused to solitude, more landscape than animal - Hannibal wonders if Will still manages to keep his own company, or if the sterile numbness of the hospital has worked and Will is laid barren. Dreamily, perhaps, he imagines Will bereft for perhaps the first time in his life, each of him partitioned away on its own within his skull, each receiving identical input – the whiteness of the ceiling, the alienating faint noises that pound through the walls. He wonders if there is anyone there he would recognize as Will, and Hannibal almost feels sad.

“Don’t tell me you _miss_ me,” he imagines Will – the Will Hannibal knew – intoning sardonically. He can see Will rolling his eyes at his silence, in his mind’s eye.

It takes Hannibal hours to fall asleep.

* * *

Alana comes on the phone, explains in broken, panicked snippets – Will has left the hospital again, somehow, in the middle of treatment. He was supposed to be unconscious. But – this time it’s _different_ , Hannibal, there’s _animals_ here, and there are all of these people and nobody knows what’s going on, and they have to figure out who’s the head of the UIU now, and -

Alana meant to warn him, Hannibal believes, even if she got distracted, but he appreciates the gesture nonetheless, and takes the warning. He hangs up, retrieves some tools, and gets in his car, flooring it for Wolf Trap. If the FBI is in as much chaos as Alana makes it sound – multiple Jacks? What would that mean? - he thinks nobody will be checking Will’s house yet. But Hannibal knows where Will’s mind wanders to when it’s lost, and he has a suspicion that will be the epicenter.

An empathetic connection with his dogs, perhaps? They were animals, and so Hannibal hadn’t seen them as much of a threat; a miscalculation he won’t make again. He should have killed them earlier, but perhaps if he’s fast enough -

A half mile away from Will’s house, Hannibal can already hear baying. He starts seeing dogs before he can even see the house. They’re pacing down the road, barking at the car. There’s one, two, four, eight – how many dogs had Will had? No more than a dozen, surely?

There’s a creek surrounding Will’s house that hadn’t been there before, like a moat, looking cut-and-pasted into the landscape. It shallows where the driveway crosses it, though, and Hannibal’s car ploughs through easily.

There are more dogs around the house. At least a hundred. They’re excited, playing and barking, but not attacking, so Hannibal steps out of the car. On the porch, Garret Jacob Hobbs leans against the flank of an enormous black deer. Neither of them – Hobbs or the nightmare deer – react as Hannibal leaves the car, but as he approaches the front steps, Hobbs calmly levels a rifle at him.

The lights are on inside the house, which is filled with people. Indistinct voices echo out. Hannibal thinks he sees _himself_ through the window, the thought of which is so curious that he loses his resolve entirely.

“What have you done, Will?” he whispers to himself.

“Private party,” says Hobbs.

Hannibal gets back in his car and leaves.

Shadow figures, animal and human, seem to flash into and out of existence in the woods around the road. As the house vanishes out of sight, Hannibal stifles a scream as Will Graham sits up in the back seat of his car. He then stifles a series of other more-or-less embarrassing instincts, including yanking the wheel to throw off an attack, or reaching for a knife. He keeps himself still. He keeps the car driving straight.

“Hello, Hannibal.”

“Hello, Will.” Hannibal looks in the rear-view mirror. Will has forgone hospital whites, and changed into or perhaps simply magicked himself his own clothes – soft flannel, a familiar shabby jacket.

Everything is crashing down around the both of them, but Hannibal is an aesthete at heart, and has to bask in appreciation. “Your final miracle. A wholly-realized self-conception. The abstract made flesh. I knew you were incredible, Will, but this is beyond anything I thought possible. You are resplendent in your becoming.”

Will nods, as though he agrees ‘you are resplendent in your becoming’ is a reasonable thing to say. His mix of self-sufficient ease and deep discomfort is so familiar it hurts. “So – how much of this did you know about?”

“I’m afraid I may have kept some things from you.”

“’There are more things in heaven and earth, Will Graham...’”

“Just so.”

“Well, I can safely say I was aware of _none_ of those things until – for the past four days, I have been on a _remarkable_ journey of self-discovery. The sedation woke up some parts of me that don’t need to interact with reality as it’s, uh, _conventionally understood_. I think I negotiated a ceasefire between myself and the FBI while I was asleep. Well, 'negotiated' is a strong word. ‘I’ is also a strong word.”

“And then you came home.”

“God, I wish I was home.”

Hannibal is about to ask, but his phone rings. Will nods permission; Hannibal answers it.

“Alana?”

“Hannibal, thank god. We found the real Jack and got Will under heavier sedation, and all the – the _others –_ vanished instantly. Everyone’s safe, at least until he wakes up again. We’re thinking an induced coma – but it’s over, Hannibal, it’s over.”

“I see,” says Hannibal. “Thank you for telling me, Alana.”

He hangs up, then glances sidelong at the man in his backseat. “Tell me Will,” he asks, a note in his voice that a less-perceptive person might not be able to tell was fear. “How are you doing this?"

“It’s not me.”

“What?”

“It’s not me doing this now. It’s you.”

Hannibal stares straight ahead into the night. “That’s impossible.”

“Isn’t it? You saw to it that you understood _exactly_ how my brain works. Everything that made me tick. My mind makes minds. I’m a… a set of instructions for making people. And you have those instructions now. You know, you laid me bare, and you didn’t even have the decency to stick around. Apparently, I did.”

“Dear Will, I could never hold all that you are in my mind.”

Will grimaces and twists his neck. “Yeah, I get that sense,” he says. “I feel… compressed. Two-dimensional, almost. But you got enough. I’m feeling better already. I think you’ll find,” and he laughs, “that I am adept at self-assembly, and remarkably _tenacious._ ”

“So like a seed, you slipped into my pocket by accident, and now...”

“Oh, I could muster some regret if you hadn’t been stuffing your pockets with me, Doctor. It’s my season now. _Watch me bloom_.”

He flutters his hand with ironic self-aggrandizement. It is remarkable how much he sounds and feels like the real Will – and that, Hannibal realizes, is how it happens; that it is exactly his impression of Will made flesh.

Hannibal is not well-versed on the Corruption, but he is fairly certain an event like this has never happened before.

“There have been a hundred billion human minds in history, but it only takes once,” offers Will. “I’m told ecologists call this kind of thing a ‘disruptive event.’”

Oh, of course. He’s in Hannibal’s head now too.

“For now,” confirms Will. “You’re thinking of going for the knife. But it wouldn’t do anything, I’m still too _abstract_. Crashing the car’s a better bet. But you’d better be sure it’ll kill both of us. ...Then again, if you die, nobody else can tell Jack and Alana what happens when I wake up in the hospital.”

“ _If_ you wake up,” says Hannibal, but it’s a meaningless threat, a stall.

“Besides,” says Will, “I don’t think you really want to. Of all the manifold things in your nature, selflessness is not one of them. Don’t you want to see what happens next?”

God will not help Hannibal. Both of them love watching beautiful things burn too much.

“Will, why are you doing this?”

“You think I want this? I want to be left alone. I thought you could help with that. I’d love to turn off my brain. But you know I can’t stop it. This isn’t about wanting. I don’t need to be convinced. I simply _am._ ”

Hannibal glances in the rear-view mirror – Will is now petting a dog that has newly appeared in the seat.

Rapidly losing composure, Hannibal cannot suppress a shudder. He is realizing he will never be alone again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies to Richard Alexander, who did in fact deduce the existence of naked molerats as a eusocial mammal before the facts of its life were widely known. In our own universe, he’s rightfully widely regarded as a paragon of evolutionary biology, and was never found dead in his apartment surrounded by conceptual mole-rats. I learned about him as an example of the predictive power of biology.


	5. Pyre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Slaughter and the Desolation. On the perils of setting your friends on fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in: AU start-of-S3.

Saving a life is a beautiful thing. Ending a life is even moreso, because it’s a higher magnitude. The world hinges on things that cannot be undone.

It is not senseless killing – quite the opposite. It is about _aesthetics_ , which is a rather fanciful way of saying that it is about _righteousness_. There is zero distinction between the two. Both are about the way the world should be. Some of his kind kill to roiling, deafening, rage-filled chords. Many march to drumbeat – or in the modern and less-civilized age, to the slow, syncopated, experimental rhythm of encrypted orders and whispers coordinated over radio channels. It’s too modern for Hannibal’s tastes, and too much of a shame that none of the players ever hear the full symphony. But he understands. When Hannibal kills, all he hears is music.

He has other interests. He enjoys good food, and opera, and the manifold capability of his friends. (Yes, _of course_ they really are his friends. No two people ever understand all of each other, and this is no different. And even if he suspects he will have to kill all of them eventually, he is still perfectly capable of appreciating their company, their capability, in the meantime. It makes that future moment all the more bittersweet, all the more exquisite.)

(Art is not just about positive experiences. That’s a child’s conception of what art _is_ , completely unrefined. And Hannibal has excellent taste.)

He revels in his friends’ complexities, at the way they have bent their lives into narratives that constrain and surprise them – and how they still have so much potential to bear fruit.

Alana is bright, unusually bright, but her convictions block the light of true genius. She finds herself racing down shaded paths, following only her phemonenal instincts into twisted shadows, unaware that she is her primary obstacle. Hannibal longs to pull the branches away – she would be a phenomenal acolyte of the Eye. Or better yet, put those branches where they belong, in her hands, as the goals they are – she could weave Webs. Hannibal wants to shape her into the force of fate she could become.

Jack is sharp, but soft around Hannibal. He has the closest to Hannibal’s taste in aesthetics, and thus, presumably, with the right nudges, his taste in everything else, and Hannibal notices how he leans into the security of Hannibal’s domestic inclinations. His dreams of Italy. Like his organization, Jack has much of the Hunt in him, and he clearly treats Hannibal with the trust and fondness of a packmate – a singularly tender connection, one Hannibal is delighted to experience. But he also sees that Jack is a man who is suspicious and not prone to deep connection, and who is slipping away from his deepest and truest connection, his wife (the most open-book Weaver that Hannibal has ever had the fortune to meet.) The plan would be sensitive, but not convoluted: Hannibal fosters Bella’s self-sufficiency and she pushes Jack away, Jack is unmoored and recasts his entire view of the world in terms of distance and separation before Bella even truly dies. And when she does die, Jack will either fall into Hannibal – not an unhappy outcome – or Jack will fall into himself, and his loneliness and despair will alchemize the last of his love into something truly incredible and spectacular to behold. Hannibal sees the terrible entity Jack could become, and wants to see that metamorphosis himself.

And then there is his Will: golden and chaotic, perceptive and unmoored, so pluripotent that it hurts. He has the Hunt in his blood, but the Spiral is in his eyes, and Knowledge suffuses his brain in silver threads. The space around him is as Lonely as anything, but he wears the faces of Strangers with ease, and the taste for the Slaughter clings to his lips like red wine. Hannibal can even see the Web in his novice machinations, the Vast oceans and winter forests of his dreams, the way his brain Spawns consciousness like vermiculture, how entrenched and pressurized and Buried he sees the world around him, the hopeless Darkness of his worst nights and periodic absences from his body. Some are stronger than others, of course, but they all have a foothold in this singular and terrified man. Anything – _anything –_ could come of it.

Hannibal is hoping, of course, for Slaughter – even God desired to make man in his own image – but whatever Will becomes, Hannibal knows he will be beautiful.

* * *

Hannibal’s tastes in company is smart, and sharp, so it is disappointing but not altogether unexpected when his three favorite people clumsily plot to murder him. They are haphazard, but they’re blinded by love, and it makes the whole thing sort of tragically elegant. It doesn’t seem right to kill them – better to leave them struggling over the aftermath.

He flees, and he takes a woman who sees too much and always has, and if he keeps her in tow she will keep him safe, and they arrive in a city full of beautiful things. He fancies he will tell some beautiful new stories here.

* * *

Alana awakes in pain that will never leave her. Her plans had fallen to the ruin she foresaw. And now, she has known the touch of true evil.

But she had been blindsided by the betrayal, the world she had seen definitively not the one that she understood or that she could control. She doesn’t wake up enlightened or in control. She wakes up _angry_.

* * *

Jack wakes up to loss. His career is gone, his quarry has escaped and bled him dry in the process.

But he finds himself next to his wife, finally on equal terms with her, both of them devastated by the horrors of the world, and they reconcile in a place far beyond the reach of good or evil. Before her eyes slip closed, she tells him to give Hannibal hell. He doesn’t leave the hospital lonely or hounded. He leaves the hospital _driven_.

* * *

Will wakes up in pieces. Hannibal had sliced him open mentally, emotionally, and literally. Will knew he had not gone in expecting to be kind, but he hadn’t expected Hannibal to make it so intimate. He had not expected Abigail, had not understood the weight of what he was saying _no_ to. He had not planned for Hannibal to hold him, to invoke all those dizzily tender feelings he thought were simply part of the mask. Nor had he imagined how Hannibal would push the knife so deeply into his gut that the sensation felt spiritual as much as real. And after all of that, he really, _really_ had not expected to live.

As Will knocks on Jack’s office door, he feels many different things. But mostly, he feels like he is _on fire_.

And then sees that Alana is there, and Jack, and while they have not yet talked about the purpose of this meeting, they exchange glances, and the three of them _know_ what they are here do to -

* * *

At the moment of epiphany, across the Atlantic, a vision comes to Hannibal. He sees them as a tripartate goddess, a beast with three faces like Lucifer. They burn. They burn red with an intense heat that will destroy canvas and stone and flesh, whatever tries to withstand them. The three heads, Alana and Jack and Will, turn at once to look at him – triplet expressions of purpose, lit by the divine and gifted with magical capability. Hannibal holds the torch that lit them, and _they know where he is_ -

Hannibal leaps awake with a shudder. Bedelia blinks at him, reads his mind, and then goes back to sleep. Hannibal remembers a classical story, a man conjuring up that which he cannot put down. Faust. Prometheus.

For some reason, right this instant, he cannot not find this story very beautiful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also featuring: Desolation revenge trio (Will, Jack, and Alana)! Eye Bedelia, who is sick of Hannibal's artistic Slaughter bullshit! I just rewatched S3 and kept vibrating at the desolation energy, so yeah, enjoy.


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